With government cheese, everything is a wedge issue

Menu

CAPITOL HILL — The federal General Services Administration has hired a high-tech Swiss cuisine corporation to serve meals at the Congressional cafeteria, in the hopes that a neutral refreshment provider will keep Democrats and Republicans from killing each other.

“We signed the deal after seeing that postmodern Washington believes farting and burping are grounds for political character assassination,” said Uve Ula of the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology. “Not even kangaroo courts in the EU erupt into the political bloodletting we saw at the Kavanaugh hearing.”

The firm specializes in low-fermentation white-collar foods for European Union lunchrooms, said Ula, with food mixtures that are designed not to stay in the gut for too long.

“Everyone benefits — even the environment — when bacteria have less time to convert food to methane,” Ula said. “Our hope is that better digestion will prevent an assassination like the one that started World War I.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who regularly orders her staff to eat at the cafeteria, praised the switch to Continental cuisine.

“Republicans are juvenile,” she said. “But it’s the incessant burping that makes Democrats insane. If the Institute can reduce that by 40 percent, we’ll let Judge Kavanaugh live.”

Scientists at the Institute did not address Feinstein’s request, but a secondary goal of the new program is the fight against global warming.

A single American politician releases the equivalent of about three tons of carbon dioxide per year, said Professor Ula, whose special menu can reduce that by 10 percent.

“We sell our mixture to about 1 million politicians per year,” he said, “which represents 300,000 tons of CO2 reduction. The burps for the politicians — and Senator Feinstein is right about this — are about 4 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Burps are far worse than farts from the environmental viewpoint.”